NERSC Awards Supercomputer Contract to Cray

August 4, 2009 by

Cray has announced that they have been awarded the contract to build the next-generation supercomputer for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center [NERSC] at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The contract includes the delivery of a new Cray XT5 machine to complement the current XT4 Franklin machine already located at NERSC. The contract also includes a future upgrade to a new Cray platform to push the machine performance beyond 1PF.

As NERSC is the primary supercomputing center for DOE’s Office of Science, making Cray’s latest technology available to our users will accelerate innovation across a wide range of scientific disciplines, helping scientists tackle problems of vital importance to our nation’s future,” said Michael Strayer, Associate Director of DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Because we serve such a large and scientifically diverse user community, it’s critical that our systems deliver the best performance while running real-world applications — especially as users scale their codes to run on tens of thousands of processor cores,” [Kathy] Yelick [Director of NERSC] said.

The new system will include many pioneering technologies, including the ability for users to customize the operating system for their own codes. The full contract is valued just over $50 million and is scheduled to go into production in late 2010. For more info, read the full release here.

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